Broadcasting life.

Menu

Dog Boy

Eighteen years and three weeks ago, I drove from Austin Texas to the San Francisco Bay Area, from a tin-roofed shack off an unpaved alley behind a high-school friend’s house to take a well-paying job in Silicon Valley. I was making a move between what I saw as a life where I wasn’t contributing anything to the world, to a place where I felt I could.

On a whim, I brought a hand-held tape recorder along for the ride. Every once in a while, I’d record random thoughts or tell some story or other. The drive itself was a bit of a blur, and I couldn’t remember what all I’d said. I despise the sound of my voice, so for eighteen years I’d never listened to the tape.

But two weeks ago, I did, and I felt compelled to transcribe my favorite part. Looking back, this story is both the core of everything that was great about my move to Silicon Valley, and everything that went really, really wrong.

My greatest achievement in art school, in my opinion, was also my first — which was sort of disappointing, as (everything else) was basically downhill from where I was.

My first summer I returned to the University of Texas and officially entered art school, I took a 3-D design class. I took a sketching class, and a 3-D design class. Out of the sketching class, I got the friendship of a woman named Stacy, who also had a painting class on my floor. And who was breathtakingly beautiful, and mind-numbingly attractive. At the same time I had just been so hurt by a major breakup that I found it impossible to really give in and accept her affection for me. (We ended up spending tons of time together. She even came over to sleep in my bed, and I never so much as tried to kiss her. I didn’t think I deserved her affection. This would be a running theme.)

But the other class I was taking was a 3-D design class. I met some really cool people there who I would end up knowing for a while, as well. It was in this class that I had the greatest achievement of my art-school experience.

(There were four of us in the group.) One was a really cool guy named Chris, who ended up being in a band called Mother Tongue and moved out to LA and did all swell — I’m told; I saw their name on the cover of a magazine once and I thought, “Wow, man, they must be bad-ass now.” And they were, they were great. (Had always been.)

Once, I’d gone to go see a movie at the Hogg Auditorium on the UT campus where they would show movies in their really kinda crappy auditorium, these really painful wooden chairs. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, but they played films that you wouldn’t see elsewhere. And he worked there, he helped run the place. (He was on ticket duty that night, and even though I hadn’t seen him in months he did the cool-guy head-nod and waved us in for free.) I was there with my girlfriend Melinda at the time, watching Casablanca. Afterwards he and his friend played this song. (It echoed down from the projection booth.) They were both playing guitar and one of them was singing, while the other would come in with harmonics in the background. And they were great. We sat there on the ground in the foyer of Hogg after the movie, just kinda holding hands, leaned up against each other, sitting on the ground. And it was cold, we were bundled up because it was February — and it was great.

It was actually his idea, the dog. We were working on our final project. Our final 3-D design project was to create a sculpture, in a group, that would be integrated with its environment.

There were two girls in our group. One girl, I think she was Greek, a very petite olive Greek with dark, black curly hair. She was beautiful. This last half of the summer was to be her last little bit of freedom before she moved to San Antonio to marry an Arabic man that she was very enamored of, who was probably her very first decent lover. So she was going off to San Antonio to marry him, then they were going to move off somewhere else, their eventual destination I’ve forgotten after ten years.

The other girl, Michelle, was really cute. We mugged out real hard one time after I dropped her off at her place, while working on the project. She was the one who contributed the leash and the rhinestone collar at the last minute.

Because: all of the suggestions that we put forward to our teacher, she shot down. And she wanted to know what we were going to do — ahead of time, we had to tell her, we had to sell her on it. It had to be a sculpture that was integrated with its environment. It had to be around the art building and the environs.

So we suggested things like a large spider in a giant web up in the corner of the stairwell of the art building, and she said no. We suggested a lot of things and they she shot down everything. Meanwhile the other groups were happily cranking along during class and constructing (things like) their enormous lipstick and power case to be erected in the girls’ bathroom. That one was done by the girls who were just taking the basic 3-D class (as a necessary elective before graduation). So there were a lot of dilettante girls who needed their three-hour credit and figured they’d fill in half the summer with this 3-D design class that (actually) took up four hours a day, I believe every day of the week.

It was a great life, though, it really was. I knew I was blessed at the time and I loved every moment of it — but I didn’t love myself, and I didn’t allow the love of anyone else to shine through.

That was really a drag. I feel like I’ve sort of truncated my emotion right now, and it’s this emotional energy that I’ve bottled up the whole time (more than ten years) to sweep me across half of North America at 85 miles an hour.

So anyway, there we were. It’s the night before the project is due. We’re at my place, we’re drunk — I’d just cooked up a big shrimp-pasta crazy-ass thing, threw in a bunch of wine and we all got plowed and hung out and tossed around ideas, just flailing in the blindness because we were so drunk, and so desperate.

The Art building was directly across a very small, one-way, one-lane, inner-campus drive from the Fine Arts building. Between the Fine Arts building and the inner-campus drive there’s this nice creek with a small bridge that you cross over before you actually enter into the dark, early 70s-constructed Fine Arts building, which was a very peaceful building: low, set back and dark and brown, and in fact integrated with its environment rather well, I think.

Chris suggested that in that inner-campus drive, we set up some nasty piece of road kill. The consensus was that “dog” was the best idea, so I got a bunch of stuff that night from a nearby grocery store after everybody left — god, it was like 2:30 in the morning. (I was coming back from dropping off Michelle at her house. That was the time we made out in my car.) And I cut out of foam core an underlying base for it to set on, like a dog lying on its side — a small dog, like a petite frou-frou dog but not super tiny. So you would have to step around it.

(On the tape, I start to chuckle.)

Michelle brought the little rhinestone-studded collar and the pink leash, like someone was out walking this little frou-frou dog and it got hit. (Now I laugh.) And it was just laying there. And I got a Tupperware container full of blood and little jiblet guts from the late-night butcher at the grocery store across the street from my complex into which I’d moved just recently, having just arrived in Austin and still getting my feet on the ground. (I’d been in Austin for nearly not quite two months, and I’d only been single for a few weeks.)

That morning first thing I went to Cloth World and bought some kinda gray-black frou-frou dog hair, a square yard of it. Went up to school and cut the thing out, wrapped little (fur) legs around the base so that they would have something to be anchored to, like they were kinda stiff, and stuffed it with crumpled up and shredded pieces of the Daily Texan, the campus newspaper that they conveniently left lying around near the Art building to be used by students in their projects.

The girl, whatever her name was — dark, Greek girl — contributed a black marble which I gummed up with all of the hog’s blood that I’d left out overnight (along with some real hamburger that had gone bad), stinking it up in my kitchen, exposed to the low heat of a Texas summer morning. Really pretty ripe. She’d contributed the black marble, which I cut a little slit out for, and with the coagulate I’d gotten at the grocery store, we then stuffed its shredded, open dog belly —

(more laugher)

— with the rotten, mixed-up hamburger meat —

(even more laughter)

—and entrails.

(laughing very hard now)

The Tupperware container of blood, we then flecked onto the shredded edge of false dog hair that surrounded his belly. The blood poured down —

(giggling uncontrollably)

— the small one-lane street, down to the white concrete curb, dripping off into the hot mid-day sun. Me and Chris sat on the side of the inner-campus drive by the stairs going directly up into the Art building and watched people pass it for a couple of hours before class started. Actually, we met at noon and we watched for an hour until the class started. We sat up there and watched people walk by it and just laughed and laughed and laughed, because it looked so fucking real —

(losing it again)

— and people just freaked out when they saw it — and, more importantly, smelled it.

(choking on laughter)

That was really the best reaction.

(choking on tears and laughter)

When their nose confirmed what they saw, they freaked out.

I really did like startling people. It was a lot of fun. I couldn’t hold back my excitement too long, though. I went upstairs to get David Erwin, who was a friend of mine I made in the class and who I’d really go through most of design school with. We’d remain in touch intermittently for the rest of my time there in Austin. I really liked him.

I went up (to our classroom and found David), and asked if he wanted to go across the street to the cafeteria in the Fine Art building’s basement, and he said, “Yeah —yeah, sure, man.” So we walked on over, and we walked out of the Art building and went down the steps, and there, as we were crossing the street — you would have to step around it to get to the Fine Arts building — was this dead dog.

As we approach it, he slows and he gets quiet and he goes, “Oh my god, I think it’s a dog. Oh my god. I think he’s dead. I think that’s a dead dog.” I bust out laughing, and his eyes get big and he looks at me and he says, “I don’t think that’s a real dog. I think you made that dog.” And I just lost it completely.

Chris (off to one side by the bushes) saw what was happening and laughed again, as David said, “You know, I was just thinking, ‘Somebody loved that dog.’” I think he was kind of upset with me for having done that. He ended up taking it in good spirits.

So (minutes later, back in class) we walked through almost all of the other students’ pieces. Since ours was outside, it was going to be one of the last ones. We went into the bathroom and we saw the giant thing of lipstick, and we went out and into the hallway and inside one of the studios and saw some crazy piece of shit in the corner — and it was all kind of interesting and fun, and here we are, we’re hanging out, we’re students in this 3-D design class, all proud of ourselves.

Then we drop outside to go look at ours, which Chris and I tell them is across the street in the gully, in the creek bed of the Fine Arts building across the street.

Our teacher, however, knows what’s going on, as she had to drive up the inner-campus drive so that she could park her little pickup truck near the sculpture department, which was on the far side of the Art building. Man, she was really cool, too. She actually drove right past it. It was a little off to the side of the road so that cars could drive past, but they had to go out of their way just a little bit to get around it on the left-hand side. It was on the Fine-Arts building side, so that coming out of the Art building you had to cross the street towards it, and you had a little time to suck it in as you approached it, coming down the stairs of the Art building. She drove past it and then stopped —

(more laughter)

— and saw us laughing, and then busted out herself laughing, gave us the thumbs up, and drove off to park.

So she completely went along with our charade of our thing being across the street.

Other people naturally had reacted to the thing in the meantime.

There was one guy who was this crazy-haired art student Master’s candidate who was doing I don’t even know —

This part of the tape ends here, for no obvious reason. But the rest of the story’s details are indelibly burned into my mind.

Other people naturally had reacted to the thing in the meantime.

There was one guy who was this crazy-haired art student Master’s candidate who was doing I don’t even know what, and walking across from the Fine Arts building he saw our little sculpture and yelled, “Goddammit,” stomping straight over and grabbing it by the leash to dispose of it. Blood and entrails fly everywhere as Chris and I leap out and shout, “No — it’s Art!”

He froze, looked at the bloodied fake fur and shredded newspaper and foam-core base dangling from the pink, rhinestone leash, and his face transforms. “I’m so, so sorry, man,” he said, and to his credit he helped us reassemble it.

Several people saw it and steered clear of the thing completely. At least one of them called the campus trash patrol, who drove up in a pickup truck and tried to scoop it up. We kept them from destroying it, with the promise it’d be gone well before sundown.

So. We all walk out of the Art building, down the short stairs, and I’m at the front of the pack so I stride headstrong across the street toward the Fine Art building’s little creek. But something marvelous happens: everyone else — except David and Chris and the two girls, who hang back to observe — slows as they approach the dog, forming a loose circle around it. I heard emotional muttering, and then a shriek — then the whole group yells, and everyone in the circle spins on their heels, groaning and scowling and shaking their heads, while I laughed hysterically, literally squeezing my sides together.

Our teacher took a few photos for us. We got an A in the class, and for the first time I felt like I had won — like I wasn’t a loser with nothing to point to, I was finally the cool guy I’d always wanted to be.

I was so wrong, and I’d find out for sure a few weeks later when I ran into a girl from that class late at night in the back of the grocery store. She was really something: smart and fun-sounding and pretty-looking, exactly the girl from whom I desperately wanted validation.

Rolling my cart over toward her, I caught her eye and did the cool-guy chin nod, saying, “Hey, good to see you again.”

Her mouth curled to a half-smile at first glance, before freezing as full recognition settled in. “Oh,” she said, looking me up and down. “You’re that dog boy.”

She turned away, redirecting her cart and rolling off. One small moment and I felt completely eviscerated, everything raw about me spilling out onto the grocery-store tile.

I never saw her again.

Too often, the things I thought I needed to do to prove myself were exactly the things that held me back. This would come up over and over when I moved to Silicon Valley, until I finally learned my lesson and was able to take the first step beyond, into the real world.

Four years ago, I began writing about my life and how I got to California. Starting today, I’ll be posting weekly updates until I finally get to the end.

Thank you for reading. Here now is the rest of story.

* I made extremely light edits, mostly dropping some repeated, irritating words. Frequent offenders: “just” and “like” and “really”. I trimmed a bit of detail for focus, and I also moved two paragraphs around to make the story a little less convoluted.